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The motivational messages on ViewSport T-shirts are meant to be bold, eye-catching and inspire hard work. They also are designed to appear through patent-pending sweat-activated technology woven into textiles manufactured at Tiny Fish Printing on Garson Avenue in Rochester.

CEO Ben Wood launched the company about five years with only $2,000, and has used a failed attempt to secure $500,000 on ABC's Shark Tank in 2012 to propel the company forward. He offered the sharks a 20 percent stake. They didn't bite.

"I'm actually proud to say that I didn't get the deal because in hindsight, it's probably the best thing that happened to me," he said.

Since the show, the company has rapidly grown while working with a number of large clients. There's an $18 Brett Favre shirt that reveals the former NFL star's number, a promotional campaign with Pepsico Inc. and work with the Eastern College Athletic Conference. ViewSport's shirts are now in malls in Europe, India and other areas, according to the company.

Recently, the Penfield-based company was awarded a $6.9 million contract to provide more than 1.4 million T-shirts for the U.S. Army through 2017. These shirts will help the Army's recruitment program at the Mission and Installation Contracting Command in Fort Knox, Kentucky, but do not incorporate the technology.

"The technology opened a lot of doors for us to build strategic relationships where companies and individuals have to take us seriously as a textile manufacturer," he said. "To get in the door, sometimes you need something that's going to differentiate you — and that's exactly what this technology has done for us."

Manufacturers have long worked to make athletic apparel more functional, either by whisking away sweat, keeping athletes cool, providing athletic support and even by tapping into biometric training programs to measure performance. The trick has been making affordable products that feel comfortable and work.

For instance, compression shirts that transmit data to a smartphone while working to increase blood flow to try and deliver more oxygen to muscles can cost $250. ViewSport's retail shirts cost up to nearly $30.

Wood, 32, armed with a chemistry degree from SUNY Binghamton, stumbled upon the idea of a sweat-activated shirt while working out. "I thought to myself, 'How cool would it be if I could somehow control those sweat patterns in a way that could create messages?' "

He dropped out of medical school and began working full-time on the company, developing an online retail and custom wholesale arm, along with a business-to-business segment.

"It's obviously one thing to produce one shirt. ... We're really making millions of shirts a year now," Wood said. "It came down to developing a process that could be scalable."

Like other apparel companies, ViewSport relies on social media to spot the phrases, trends and images it'll incorporate in its shirts. It also helps to have almost 80,000 followers on Instagram.

"You really need to have your fingers on the pulse on where people's specific choices are going," Wood said. "If you don't, you are going to have a lot of different inventory that is not going to sell. It is exhausting, too, because you have to always be on, always be ready for the thing and be ready to capitalize, too."

He added that the company is also looking to work its technology into other products, like socks, raincoats, bathing suits or even umbrellas. It also plans to add more colors. Ideally, he'd like to see the technology weaved into other products in a way Gore-Tex is in other brands.

"I don't necessarily see the technology as being en vogue for a long period of time," Wood said. "I see ViewSport as establishing itself and then doing other things outside of the technology."